From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
On the whole, science is seen as one of the most trusted professions- and we need to retain that trust. It is essential that the public knows how deeply science and technology affect their lives.
We've had wars, poverty, and homelessness long before anyone went into space. It's not accurate to say, 'we're doing space exploration, and that's why we have poverty' – if we stopped space exploration, those problems wouldn't be solved, they haven't been solved in thousands of years.
We now have all the tools to do it. Computers are a billion times more powerful, the data is vastly better, our understanding of psychology is vastly better – we have all the elements we need now to do these things and to do them well.
Measuring wellbeing solves two big problems: it tells us what truly matters (not just income or health metrics), and it lets us compare different types of charities—poverty relief, education, the arts—by how much happiness they generate. We move from vibes‑based giving to data‑driven giving.
A regional war in say, South Asia, which involved as few as one hundred nuclear bombs would result in firestorms in their urban centres that would put so much smoke and particulate into the atmosphere that the earth would be covered in a cloud that would reflect sunlight back into space and reduce global temperatures but two to three degrees for several years. This would kill most food crops on the planet, resulting in massive famines and starvation.
It has been said that we went to the moon to explore the moon, but while we were there, we looked over our shoulder and discovered Earth. Seeing the Earth in that perspective upgraded the firmware of all our brains, of everyone's subconscious.
There's a risk of underestimation if we only count the easily quantifiable elements. It's easy to dismiss minute pathways as insignificant due to their size, but with an infinite number, their collective impact can be substantial.
A quantum computer is very similar to a classical computer, with one key difference: it takes full advantage of the laws of quantum mechanics. The heart of quantum mechanics is the concept of amplitudes. An amplitude is a new kind of number, related to but distinct from an ordinary probability. Amplitudes can be positive, negative, or even complex numbers.
Sometimes people view disability as something permanent when, in fact, our bodies are malleable with technology. One could be disabled for a portion of one's life, and then not be for another; the body is malleable and transformable with technology. Disability is not a fixed condition, it's fluid. This is good news- it means that we can ultimately eliminate disability
Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the entire planetary 'net primary productivity' is today devoted to sustaining this one species- us.
We are scientifically naked in front of this threat. We do not have the diagnostics to quickly detect an MDR or XDR case. Once detected, we do not have the drugs to effectively treat the patient at reasonable cost, and we do not have a TB vaccine.
We can literally see in science that having an open mind, an openness to the unexpected, and the right goals and direction create a greater likelihood of success. This mindset literally gives people the permission to look- and act- on the unexpected.